Dev Q&A Questions from players
We compiled all the questions from the Questions for PerBlue thread and have organized them together! In some cases, if there were multiple instances of the same question, we’ve consolidated it down to a single question, or summarized it so we can give a more general answer. If you don’t see your specific question, likely we lumped it in with another one on the same topic.
There are some questions that we can’t answer. We won’t talk about datamined heroes - there are sometimes bits in the game data that aren’t finalized or approved, and we can’t talk about heroes until they’re announced. There’s a lot of questions asking about future heroes - will we add Anna, will we add Phineas & Ferb characters, etc. Unfortunately, we can’t talk about heroes that haven’t been approved yet. We do watch your requests, and we work to fit as many as we can into the roadmap.
Current Heroes
- What hero was the hardest to make (skillset)?
- [DoubleBeans] It depends on what you mean by hardest. Kim Possible went through the most iterations, if that answers your question.
- I have been seeing many unnecessary words in recent heroes’ skill set when they can be summarized in one to three words, meanwhile older heroes’ skillsets are more straightforward. Why has this changed?
- [DoubleBeans] We don’t want to reuse old heroes’ skills and kits so we come up with something new or tweak the old. This often translates to more nuances and complexities in the kits that we feel we have to communicate. I agree though, we’ll work on less wordy wording going forward.
- I just have to ask: Was it a clever reference to the film that Fear is a counter to Elsa? Or just a funny coincidence?
- [DoubleBeans] To be completely honest, this was a happy coincidence.
Hero Refreshes
- Will there be more refreshes? Will we go back to doing supporting heroes with smaller buffs? Will we be doing more player polls to choose heroes to refresh?
- [DoubleBeans] There will be more refreshes and we will do polls every now and then to pick the next hero to refresh. I don’t think we’ll go back to smaller buffs for the foreseeable future. Refreshing heroes takes more time than you might think and we prefer to give 1 hero a great, well rounded refresh rather than trying to buff a bunch of heroes with less satisfying refreshes in the same amount of time.
- How do we choose which heroes are refreshed?
- [DoubleBeans] Player polls, feedback in game and on the forums, and which hero we think could have a more niche oriented kit.
- Is it possible if recent heroes can be refreshed? [DoubleBeans] We like to focus on older heroes because they tend to need them more. We can mix in some more recent heroes in the refresh polls so you guys can decide!
- Will we refresh red skills specifically? Woody or Madam Mim as example
- [DoubleBeans] I don’t think we’ll focus just on red skills when refreshing a hero but we will consider them when refreshing a whole hero.
- There are very few hero refreshes of Support characters. Is there a reason? Miguel, Judy, Woody…etc need Hero Refresh
- [DoubleBeans] No reason! We’ll mix in some more Support heroes in 2021!
Hero Power and Balance
- One problem is how Basil’s lack of armor negation and/or evasion/tenacity is killing him, as well his purple skill which blocks the use of green, blue and red skill, as he keeps spamming his active; normally it would be a good thing but he keeps targeting invincible heroes like Hades or Brute. It would be good if his purple skill would instead grant him armor negation which would increase by skill level and his white skill removes all buffs with every 5th dart. So evasion from badges would be welcomed as well. Everyone talks about how Basil is bad since release and nothing was done to make it better, pretty disappointing. A different problem is how badges are given to heroes, just as Basil is lacking armor negation/evasion, some heroes really missing reality negation - example Vanellope, an old which is missing reality negation. Vanellope also didn’t receive from almost a year any fantastic crit even though all of her skills deal fantastic damage, it hurts the balance even more as she is an old hero and her HP isn’t the highest. On other hand, some heroes receive normal crit even if they don’t deal any normal damage; such as Joy, Jack Skellington or Fear.
- [DoubleBeans] So I could go on forever answering balance/normal gear questions but I’ll be short. I’ll take a look at the normal gear for the heroes mentioned here and keep all your feedback in mind for future rarities. As for heroes that get normal crit when they don’t deal normal damage; it’s just unavoidable for them to not get at least a little.
- Are you planning to change the properties of badges someday so that older characters can get better? I can again come up with Jack Sparrow, who has 29 Armor Negation since R6. Has no Evasion or Tenacity, which is fairly common for Damage heroes even those with a counter move (like Mulan). Same with Basil, his tragicness comes up from no Armor Negation (offense) or no Evasion or Tenacity (defense)
- ((addressed in answer above))
- Why some of the earliest heroes released with poorest stats as Ralph, Yax, Vanellope or Woody never were refreshed, and heroes like Dr. Facilier received full refresh, even if his situation wasn’t like Basil’s or beta heroes? It doesn’t help with balance at all. Is there a way for you guys to buff ALL old (first edition) heroes of this game at the same time? I don’t talk about changing their skill set or anything, just some basic stat and friend disc stat buff are fine. This will help a lot of players as we all have our bias so every time there are polls to decide who gets refreshed, it all leads to no-need argument and disappointment.
- [Leaf] We’ve looked into refreshing the heroes everyone gets access to at the very beginning of the game, like Vanelope or Ralph, but we keep coming to the roadblock that it will throw off the balance and the play of the early game. Players who are new to Disney Heroes will have a more confusing experience, and will be less likely to keep playing and join our community. We’ve decided to hold off on refreshing Vanelope and other very early heroes like her until we can come up with a better solution.
- When are you going to balance the heroes? Many people are asking for this. One hero is broken, and another sucks. I’d like for all heroes to have similar stats, and for some buffs/nerfs to happen. Will Cheshire be nerfed? Cheshire… when will his head deal significantly less damage? Will basil be buffed? How was Basil crafted? Are you guys planning to refresh him?
- [Polaris] We’ve been working more diligently in the last year to ensure heroes aren’t out of balance. Not all heroes are intended to be strong in all areas of the game. Some heroes are specifically created to be strong in Invasion, while others are great at PVP or in City Watch. There are some very niche heroes that don’t work well in all combat.
- Are some specific skills for heroes intentionally worse than the others especially purple and red skills? e.g. Mim’s red skill is… uhm, pretty bad. (excluding invasion, of course)
- [DoubleBeans] We try to make heroes’ purple and red skills fit their kits as best we can. Some red skills are specifically tuned to be better in certain modes to give certain heroes an interesting niche.
- Could we know the story of Kim-Duke friendship campaign, it was removed (thanks Goofy) and it would be nice to know what was this friendship about.
- [DoubleBeans] This is a great question! I had to talk to our lead writer about this one. The friend campaign was going to be a story about Dr. Drakken creating a secret lair among the rooftops of the city. Kim Possible would have to stop him while Duke Caboom helped her jump from rooftop to rooftop.
Hero Wishlist
- Will you add X character or Y show? Will you focus on intellectual properties you already used or add characters from other movies/shows?
- [Leaf] We create the list of heroes we want to use over a year in advance of them launching in-game. We decide which characters have abilities that can lend themselves to a battling game, and then we work with Disney to make sure our vision is consistent with what that character can or would do in their own world. We then go through a multi-step process with hero art that includes concepts, line drawings, color, and finally animation & VFX where we work hand-in-hand with Disney to ensure high quality. Developers then take the final product to implement in-game, Designers balance, and Quality Assurance tests for bugs. Finally, we release these heroes to you, our players! It’s a fairly long process from ideation to launch, but a fulfilling one that allows us to make sure only the very best quality and Disney-tastic heroes make it into your hands.
- We can share that in the next year new heroes will come from Pixar, live action films, Disney Classics, TV shows, recent movies and more!
- We finally got Kim a few months ago. How does it feel to not have update comments filled with “It’s bad because Kim isn’t here” and other such phrases?
- [DoubleBeans] Feels very good.
- [Leaf] I’m excited to hear who will be the next forum-favourite character to rise above the others!
- Will there be any new characters this month?
- [Leaf] The next Heroes will arrive on the scene to kick off our New Year right on January 1, 2021!
- Will you continue to add characters because of remakes?
- [Leaf] We are planning on it!
- Will there be any future duo characters?
- [DoubleBeans] Yes.
- About characters coming in the game next year?
- [Leaf] There are quite a few Heroes coming to the game in 2021
- Which upcoming character are you most excited about?
- [Leaf] One of my favourite Disney movies is getting more Heroes in the game in 2021! Can’t say more than that.
- Is it true that Tarzan can’t be a game character because of copyright issues?
- [DoubleBeans] In short, yes.
- Are there any heroes who have been canceled or scrapped mid development (if so who were the heroes?)
- [Leaf] Kim was the closest one to going into development but not making it into the game; and as you saw, we worked hard over 2 years to make it happen! There have been no Heroes that have been permanently canceled mid-development, and I hope none in the future either.
Stamina and Badges
- Stamina consumption is one of the biggest issues of the game. Hero upgrading Badge farming is a big catastrophe. Reduce the number of bits needed for a badge. Simplify badge crafting trees.
- [DoubleBeans] We agree the badge crafting system could be simplified. We’re thinking through some ways to address this in the future.
- Will badge drops from campaign ever be increased? Is there some plan to improve hero chips farming? It’s too much to keep up with red skill requirements. Adds to the Stamina pinch.
- [Leaf] There isn’t a definite answer to this question, but this is one reason why we run 2x campaign drop events and have items that do the same.
- Trial bits should get doubled and more bits like Ukulé and Fa family,Close shave should be added. Also, can badges in the Trials be switched up every season?"
- [DoubleBeans] I like that idea! We’ll definitely consider changing up badges in Trials on a regular basis in the future.
Red Skills and Hero Chips
- Now that all characters have red skills, are there plans to make them less expensive? 10 million coins needed to unlock one is ridiculous. Recently skill chip scaling was released, but it’s still not enough, it was increased from 35 to 70 (on old servers), while these servers need now 5.5k skill chips to max A SINGLE RED SKILL and this will increase by 500 skill chips per each cap rise. Possibly reduce the number of keys required to start epic CW from 35 to 20? Increase the number of heroes from 3 to 5 to receive red chips?
- [Leaf] The Red Skill chip scaling that was released with 2.5 was our first foray into balancing the Red Skill chip economy since Red Skills were originally launched. We are going to see how our first changes affect the economy and player progression and then will evaluate what additional steps are needed.
Hero Progression
- Do you plan to give us more Orange and Red items (as is XP for example)?
- [Commander Jack] We’re currently discussing the potential of a few new consumable items, but we don’t have anything to share yet for the moment.
- Will there ever be a new type of crate exclusive hero?
- [Polaris] The team is currently evaluating the exclusive crate system. We don’t have anything to share yet because the discussions are in the early stages still.
- Do you plan to lower your skills costs?
- [Commander Jack] We’ve recently introduced new VIP perks that should help with this. Starting at VIP 5, you’ll no longer need to spend Skill Points to upgrade skills for heroes up to level 30. Every two VIP levels after that, the level limit increases by 5, up to level 65 at VIP 19.
- Will some of the old heroes be in shops anytime?
- [Leaf] Heroes in shops are refreshed on a regular basis. We will continue to rotate heroes in and out.
- How about new consumables? Would be nice to have new items like x2 items on ports, x2/x3 energy points with diamonds, Speed/strong/healing… Booster for City watch during 24h…
- [Commander Jack] It’s a good point, we haven’t had anything new on the consumable front for a while, but we’re definitely open to suggestions from the community! As a start, maybe we can open a new thread to collect everyone’s thoughts and then go from there.
- Many aspects of the game need updated as they all are outdated. Sign-in rewards are useless (except hero chips), CW gold reward is not enough for 1 single hero skills update, disc power from Heist is nowhere enough (4.500 per shocking battle and it takes 11.000+ for 1 lv above 170…) Would you guys have plan to update them?
- [Commander Jack] When we look at making changes to our in-game economy, a lot of work goes into evaluating what it’s current state is, what the current needs of our players are and what the impact of any changes we make will mean to that feature and the rest of the game. In recent months we’ve made reward improvements to Invasion, Guild War and City Watch (e.g. red skill chips) and we’re still actively looking at other areas to update and scale better with your progress.
- One of the most promising changes of this past year has been the scaling of various rewards and offers to at least partially reflect the increased costs of the most recent levels/ranks. There is one area that’s so far been overlooked, though: the daily hero XP rewards in Arena/Coli, especially in Challengers. Right now, if you finish in first place in your challengers division, you get 3 Mega XP bottles, good for 4500 XP, or 0.2% of what you need to level up a hero that’s around level 210. Is there a chance those rewards might get boosted to the point where they aren’t, well, utterly pointless
- [Commander Jack] See the answer above.
Deals
- Why are the deals for stamina packs and crates so bad compared to older servers? S21 sees 83 stamina packs and 0 diamond crates in a $5 deal yet S1 sees 850 stamina packs and 300 diamond crates. Crates deals give 2,168 crates for $5 (S1)
- [Polaris] We are working to do a better job getting resources to players in the game (scaling rewards for example), so inflated deals don’t feel as necessary. The gap between free to play players and spenders is something we’ve been working hard to address, and selling more things in deals makes that worse. We’ve deliberately tried to avoid that pitfall with servers 21 and 22 by increasing the contents of the deals more slowly, and working to improve the systems in the game to be more generous.
- Can you focus more on 5 to 20 dollar worth deals? I am pretty sure that most people refrain from buying anything over 50 dollars in a video game. Unless you have some data saying otherwise.
- [Polaris] We do try to offer things across different price points. To the point about data, we do see players buy those $50 and $100 regularly, showing there’s players that do want those bigger deals.
Cap increases
- Can you slow down/postpone cap raises? Every 4 weeks is only doable for p2w players and pretty stressful for f2p and new players. Please be more transparent with the data, because it seems doubtful that players left when the increases were longer.
- [Polaris]We’ve been very consistent with a 4-week release for rarity and level caps. In a few cases, we experimented with slightly longer cadences of 5 or 6 weeks. It was exceptionally clear that more players left the game when there were more weeks between level caps, and even with the longer time between updates, the negative feedback around rarity and team level increases was not different. We know that cap raises are not popular with all players, but it’s a necessary part of maintaining the game’s health. For that reason, we will stick to a 4-week cadence for the foreseeable future and are not able to veer away from that. What we want to focus on is giving players more rewards to help those who feel perpetually behind to catch up. This is why we’re adding more rewards to the game that scale with team level. We’ve recently done this with red skill chips. This will be a very slow process to get right, but it’s our hope that it will feel less like a grind when new content is released, and more like something new to experience and work toward. We want the feeling to be that rewards get better as you progress through the game.
Shops
- Do you plan to lower the costs in Badge Bazaar? Some of the badges needed can cost as much as 80,000 Tokens? Do you plan to refresh other shops as you did Black Market and Mega Mart? It would be nice to have others, e.g. Arena and Coliseum, drop Badge Booster Crates as well.
- [Leaf] We will likely take a look at re-balancing some shops in 2021.
- Only the Challenge shop rotates hero chips daily. Can there be another shop to do the same?
- [Leaf] Shop hero rotations are done with a lot of intention and care. We will not be rotating them daily in the short term, but we can consider what it would take to do that in the future.
- Would be easy to add a guild inventory where ppl can donate invasion boosters for whatever who need them? There’s a point where weaker members cant continue and their boosters would be more useful for the stronger members.
- [Leaf] This is an interesting idea to expand on the Guild Aid feature!
- [Commander Jack] Agreed, we can definitely take a look to see if we can make this happen. Great suggestion!
- More Shops: Trials shop? Port shop?
- [Polaris] No current plans for new shops.
Invasion
- Can we get Special Invasion more often? It’s been a while since we got one and we really enjoyed getting multiple mods, not just one per Invasion, and of all types
- [Leaf] We would like to do more special Invasions, but they do take a lot of work to set up than we’d like. I’ll talk to the team and see if we can’t get some sort of schedule going to have more special Invasions slightly more frequently
- Mods: There should be a rule imposed that we can’t equip more than 45 bonus levels of a certain skill with this update, if you consider it. With this we could get more place for other mods, while not having ridiculous stats (as are now with +160 levels on a mod). Can we get all non-exclusive mod upgrade pieces or double of the amount we get now? To get 90 mod upgrades of one sort we need to wait 6 weeks and that’s a very long time. Regarding SP mods, could we have a change to it? I propose making the stats raising exponentially 50 levels above the cap with Bonus Skill Levels Upgrades changing to +15, +25, +35 and +45 levels. +45 levels raising exponentially should be roughly equal to the current +100 levels
- [Commander Jack] In general, we’ll definitely be looking at the Mods feature in the future and evaluating what changes need to be made there, but for the near term we don’t have any immediate changes planned.
Cosmetics
- Will there be more opportunities to get cosmetic crates other than contests?
- [Commander Jack] Do you have any suggestions where you’d like to see cosmetic crates awarded?
- Will Elsa’s Frozen iconic snow queen dress return to the game? I missed Elsa’s first appearance so much when I started playing Disney Heroes Battle Mode last October.
- [Leaf] We would like her original Frozen dress back in the game as well! Since the Elsa in the game is now from Frozen II, it would not make sense for her to wear her dress from the first movie. But that doesn’t mean we won’t eventually come up with a good solution!
General
- What’s your plan for the game in 2021?
- [Leaf] We want to make sure the game continues to be a joy to play every day! To that end we will be continuing to refresh economies, rewards, game modes, as well as developing new and enjoyable ways to play with all your Heroes.
- How is the 2022 roadmap coming along?
- We’re in the early stages of planning the 2022 roadmap. Starting with hero proposals!
- How is Lightning ROB doing? Any plans for more bosses like Lightning ROB?
- [Leaf] We do have soft plans to develop Lightning R.O.B in 2021, stay tuned!
- When did the game start development?
- [Leaf] Approximately September 2017
- Why no villains in October?
- [Leaf] We had Lock, Shock & Barrel!
- The Vault was a feature removed long ago. Any specific reasons as to why it was removed? And if it may ever return?
- [Leaf] The Vault did not perform well enough to be rolled out, and it likely will not be coming back.
- Are there several designing teams in PerBlue? I mean, some characters look more rounded, like in the movies/shows(Jumba, Sadness, Kim), while others get much more corners(Pleakley, Kristoff, Belle).
- [Leaf] We have one team, but we work on a character-by-character basis with Disney to determine what is the perfect look for each one.
- Sometimes you add more badges from some specific movies/shows. Why exactly do you do that and does that show chances of characters to come? I mean, some have a lot of badges, some have just a few.
- [Leaf] This can depend on our own inspiration for badges. The badge creation process has no overlap with the Hero creation process.
- Any thoughts on server mergers soon? Will server 16 ever be merged ( i mean unless someone is having a conversation its a ghost town)?
- [Leaf] As announced, we are merging a few servers come January. We continue to monitor Server health to determine when the next merges would be most beneficial for them.
- Only one question. Why is this ipad graphic bug continuously ignored for at least half a year?![|97x67]
- [Polaris]Display issues like this are typically associated with a single device and are very challenging to fix. In general when bugs hang around for a long time, it’s either challenging to track down what’s causing it to happen, or we don’t have a clear way to fix it without causing other issues.
- Do you have to pay royalties to the actors who play the live-action characters in the game for using their likeness?
- [Leaf] Nope! We pay Disney as a whole.
- Are you going to add new features in the future? Like more than 3 waves per fight or something like ports but with consumables items or a merge feature where you get a basic badge free every x time and you can get badges merging them, a crafting feature for exp bottles or energy points to batteries… The options are huge!
- [Leaf] You said it! The options ARE huge!! And we will definitely be continuing to develop new features in the future.
- Diamond Crates Lvl, we will see their lvl increased some day?
- No new levels are planned right now. The Diamond Crate upgrades are a feature that benefits early to mid stage players. We’re currently thinking about a new late stage crate.
- New loading screen?
- [Leaf] Believe it or not, it took us more than 6 months to develop our latest loading screen! A lot of care and attention goes into such an intricate piece of art. As such, while we will likely update the loading screen in the future, there aren’t plans to do so at this time.
Hero Design and Story
- How do you decide which character will be just one, a couple or trio and In this 2 year have you thought about a toon of more than three (like the muses from hercules) and then discarded that type of toon?
- [DoubleBeans] We decide if heroes should be a duo or trio if they are duos or trios in their respective films or shows. The problem is kits that have more than one character in them are exponentially more difficult to animate which limits what their kits can do. So we do try to do duos and trios but we also limit ourselves on how many we do.
- What is the process for creating a hero for the game? What is Disney’s role in the process of designing a hero and all that comes with it? What is PerBlue’s role in the process of designing a hero and all that comes with it?
- [DoubleBeans] We basically do all of the animation/design/programming and Disney approves them a few times along the way.
- Where did you get inspiration from for the story behind the game? Besides the movie or franchise they come from, where do you get inspiration from for a hero’s skillset, especially if they are not the fighting type?
- [DoubleBeans] Good questions. We wanted a world where all of these Disney characters could hang out together and we liked the idea of them all hanging out in a game. To get inspiration for characters that don’t generally fight, we watch their movies or shows and watch for concrete, animated actions they make and use those for inspiration.
- Is there a specific process to deciding WHEN a Hero gets added to the game? Like specific events or movie releases, or something?
- [DoubleBeans] New movie releases do influence when we release some of the heroes, yes.
- Are the heroes limbs attacked or not, because I found a weird frame of kronk and it looks like the legs and arms aren’t attached And just laid under him. There are a lot of strange frames in the game
- [Polaris] Not all animations are intended to play in sequence, so if you’re on the hero screen playing through the animations, there can be instances where the joins will be changing from one to another. For example, if in one animation his knee is supposed to be bent one way, and the next frame or animation it’s bent the other, some weird rotation and scaling interpretations can happen in between.
- Did any heroes have different skills before being added to the game
- [DoubleBeans] We iterate on some heroes before they end up in the game, yes. Kim Possible had many skill set iterations before she was released.
- Will gold rank(s) or whatever the colour is of next rank will give some new source of power like red ranks has given? I have one idea and community seems to like it.
- [DoubleBeans] Yes. Stay tuned for details!
- [Commander Jack] Our next rank will definitely include a new way for your heroes to make an impact in battles and give you a new way to think about how you’re building your lineups. That’s all I can say for now, but stay tuned, more details will be coming soon!
- How does it get decided what skills have level requirements vs those who doesn’t have a level requirement? Many crowd control skills have level requirements, but some doesn’t so wondered how it gets decided”.
- [DoubleBeans] Skills need a way to scale and fail chances are one way we make them scale. It’s decided mostly on a hero-to-hero basis but, generally, if the skill has a way to scale without a fail chance, we just don’t include the fail chance.
- Several months back, Polaris mentioned the possibility of making the City Watch Reset reward from Challengers Arena/Coli into a consumable item, so we could use it at our discretion instead of having to use them right away to get any advantage from them. Is this in development, or at least possible?
- [Polaris]This issue is still in design. The challenge is we don’t want players to hoard the reset items, but we also don’t want to penalize players who rank highly in challenger.
Heist
- Do you guys plan on refreshing or adding new features to the Heist soon? I’ve noticed that Heist isn’t as great as it used to be due to the fact that less people are using it. IS there any plans for for a heist rework? Heist hasn’t been changed at all since the three new difficulties were added this past February, and hasn’t had a significant change since the addition of Accomplices, Bodyguards, and Second Wind in early March, 2019. Is there any chance that we might see some further changes to this mode in the future to shake things up? Could we at least have the option to leave a heist if no other heroes have been active over the past 60 seconds or so?
- [Leaf] If you’d like to see Heist have a big sweep of Quality of Life improvements, definitely vote for it the next time we have a poll on the forums for where we should focus next! That isn’t to say it won’t get any love until that time, but getting it picked in the poll for what Quality of Life focus we do will have a big impact.
Guild War
- Guild War Matchmaking: Any plans to fix the broken match making systems in war on the servers?MMR in guild war is really unfair. If you get too high, you end up facing top 3 guilds twice in a season and you may miss out on season’s end rewards. It’s literally smarter to lose some fights to lower MMR. I know it takes a long time to make big changes to war but is it possible to make a quick fix so you can only face the same guild only once per season? MMR matchmaking for war is mostly sound, except for guilds ranked roughly 6th to 12th; those guilds have to face the top 5 guilds for the majority of their battles in most months, and because of how power always gets concentrated at the top of the rankings, they’re all but certain to lose every one of those battles, making it extremely difficult if not impossible to reach Legendary until their MMR drops out of the top 12. Has there been any discussion about how this problem could be addressed?
- [Leaf] We’ve taken a lot of time in the past 2 years to look at Guild War matchmaking, and I’m sorry to say that we’re out of low hanging fruit or even medium sized changes that would make a positive impact on this. There’s a lot of technical challenges we would need to overcome. However, that doesn’t mean we’re giving up! It just means we may need to think more outside-the-box.